A TweakTown Week in Review: Top Picks

Hello TechEye viewers, this is TweakTown’s content editor reporting with our second weekly update on all the technological happenings over at TweakTown. This past week has seen a wave of diversity that will peek interest for all comers.

First up, another Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB SSD from OWC entered our labs last week, but this isn’t to be mistaken for the first model with the same name that OWC released about a year prior. The latest revision uses the SF-2282 controller with 32nm Toshiba Toggle flash and as you will see in our full review, it takes significant leaps and bounds ahead to become one of the quickest SSDs to have passed through the TT labs to date.

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding GIGABYTE’s new Z68 weapon that nestles its way neatly into the G1.Killer arsenal. We got our hands on the G1.Sniper2 for a full going over and were quick to see why it’s been received by the PC enthusiast and gamer communities so well.

With dedicated Creative X-Fi audio, Killer E2100 networking and a kaboodle of other gamer and overclocker friendly features on the dominating Z68/LGA1155 platform, for gamers in particular, finding something not to like about the board will be the most difficult, aside from perhaps the understandbly higher price tag compared to some of its competitors offerings.

If you’re sold on the Sniper2 and now setting your target on a suitable kit of RAM, we looked at one of Corsair’s latest Dominator GT series dual channel memory kits earlier this week; an 8GB, 2133MHz kit which particularly stands out due to the lower required 1.5v spec versus other 2133MHz kits that more commonly need 1.6v or above.

With timings of 9-11-9-27, an upperscale default speed of 2133MHz and the beefier 8GB capacity versus your more typical 4GB, there are little to no tradeoffs from the lowly 1.5v requirement to get these modules humming along and as expected, our testing revealed there’s a bit of tinkering room for some timings and speed adjustments to squeeze even more out of the modules.

Our storage Chris guru was grinning like a cheshire cat upon receiving a certain package from OCZ recently, knowing that what was lurking inside was one of the fastest SSD solutions known to man, the mighty RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-E SSD in 480GB capacity form.

With well over 1500MB/sec read and 1350MB/sec write speeds on tap in ideal situations (confirmed by our ATTO testing), despite the choice of asynchronous versus synchronous flash used, the RevoDrive 3 X2 certainly won’t let you down in the performance ranks, but being a top-tier, workstation oriented product, the price probably will at well over $1600 USD. But if the large 480GB capacity is way overkill, you can always opt for the entry level 120GB model that brings pricing back down to Earth at a respectable $399.99 over at NewEgg at the time of writing.

If you’re a big fan of Rugby, you’d be excited about the 2011 World Cup kicking into action come September 9, beginning with New Zealand v Tonga at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand. In coincidence, Developer HB Studios has just launched a new rugby gaming title for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Rugby World Cup 2011 – The Game, the first rugby title out for quite some time, since 2007 actually.

HB Studios were the team that built the EA rugby games over the years, but with EA not releasing a rugby game for the World Cup, it was up to a lesser known publisher, 505 Games to run with it. However, those who played HB Studios’ previous games and loved the way they played will be happy to know that the formula is pretty much the same this time around. You can read our full review on the game here folks.

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you already know that the East Coast of the US was ravaged by a hurricane. In the hurricane’s wake thousands of homes were flooded, entire cities underwater and billions of family pictures, digital and print are now destroyed. For the last couple of years we’ve been urging readers to plan ahead, prepare for the worst and to get your data secure.

When it comes to natural disaster protection, no one does it better than ioSafe. ioSafe has been selling the Solo, a well-built external hard drive enclosure that is able to resist fire, water and pressure for years now. The newest version, the SoloPRO takes the original Solo design and enhances it with faster interfaces to your PC or MAC. Several months ago we looked at the USB 2.0 / eSATA model, but this week we looked at the USB 3.0 model.

And that about wraps up the major happenings from our neck of the woods for this past week. Until next, adios folks!